Caesar wears camouflage. So do Brutus and Mark Antony, and their swords are machetes.

Of all the many time periods in which directors have set Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" - Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Kennedy White House - I don't know that anyone has used the ongoing warfare in postcolonial Africa before. Michael Gene Sullivan has done just that with the African-American Shakespeare Company at the African American Art & Culture Complex.

A West African lilt buoys the language. It flirts with the iambic pentameter in a manner that invigorates the poetry and makes even the most familiar speeches sound fresh - particularly when delivered with the clear, expressive diction of B. Chico Purdiman's Cassius; Fred Pitts' Antony; or Tristan Cunningham as Brutus' very focused wife, Portia, co-conspirator Decius and an arrogant young Octavius Caesar.

The protracted, ever-changing warfare of the setting adds a sense of unpredictable danger. Purdiman channels that uncertainty to feed the urgency with which Cassius woos David Moore's stolid Brutus. L. Jeffrey Moore's top-dog Caesar taps into the same fear when he almost yields to the pleas of Calpurnia (Amy Lizardo) to stay home on that fatal Ides of March.

These aspects succeed in part in realizing Sullivan's stated goal. The primary playwright, as well as an actor and director, for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Sullivan is less interested in taking a new look at the play than in using it to make us rethink our attitudes about the wars in Africa - in the context of the past few thousand years of tribal conflict in Europe.

It's a worthy goal but only intermittently good theater. That's partly due to both the way Sullivan has cut the text - down to 100 minutes - and his chamber theater approach, using only the six actors already named.

Minor parts are combined or conflated with major ones fairly well, but some of the role doubling gets confusing. The action up to the murder of Caesar is clear enough, but then Sullivan jumps into the midst of the succeeding civil war. When Octavius (Caesar's adopted heir) suddenly appears as Antony's co-equal partner, we have no idea who he is or how he got there.

The latter scenes are anticlimactic, but that's not uncommon with "Caesar." Where Sullivan's version takes hold - as in Cassius' warily insistent plotting or Portia's midnight scene with Brutus - play and politics work together to engrossing effect. And his staging of Antony's funeral speech is a study in effective manipulation in oratorical, theatrical and political terms all rolled into one.